Top 10 Terrible Type Transgressions

To err is human, but to commit these typographic sins is anything but divine. As a long-time Adobe InDesign trainer and print designer I’ve seen more than my share of hideous typesetting. I’ll admit that most of these mistakes I’ve made myself in my early days, but over time and with minimal study, plus a little attention to detail, I’ve learned how to coax elegant results from type. If you learned to type on a typewriter, chances are good you’re one of the worst offenders. But this isn’t your fault. The typewriter, in its day, was an amazing invention that brought typesetting to the average person at a relatively low cost. There was something soothing about the clacky-clack sound of a room of typists pounding on a hefty Olivetti or Underwood. Despite the fact that most people who learned on a typewriter haven’t touched such a machine in ages, old habits die hard. In the list that follows, the first five typographic mistakes tend to be holdovers from the days of the typewriter. The next five errors are often made by those who’ve simply never learned the right way to use a word processor or page layout application like Adobe InDesign. After reading this list of type no-nos, if you’re among the not-guilty, congratulations! Pat yourself on the back (no gloating, please). For those still making some or all of these goofs, take heart. Fixing these problems is easy, as you’ll see. Now that you know.

1. Two Spaces After a Period

Those of you who know me won’t be surprised when I lead off this list decrying the perennial faux pas: using two spaces after a period. Why was the typewriting generation indoctrinated to use two spaces after a period in the first place? Typewriters used mechanical keys

that struck an inked ribbon. All keys were the same width and occupied the same amount of horizontal space. For example, the ‘l’ key was the same width as the ‘w’ key. This property is called monospacing. To help make typing more readable, typists put two spaces at the end of a sentence.  When computers came along, type was set using fonts with proportional spacing. Proportional spacing adjusts itself based on the letter. The need for two spaces to differentiate the end of sentences disappeared. This practice of typing two spaces at the end of a sentence remains a hard habit to break. No matter how many times I tell my sister not to put two spaces at the end of a sentence, her fingers resist. Space-space. Oh well.

2. Using Spaces or Tabs to Position Type

Every so often I see beginning students using spaces or tabs to position their type horizontally across a page, as for column headings or centered text. This is a holdover from the days when people designed pages in Microsoft Word. Don’t do it. It’s embarrassing and clunky. InDesign has many better ways to position text. Among them are editable tab stops, left and right margin settings, horizontal alignment, first or last line indents, and Inset Spacing.

3. Using Tabs Instead of First Line Indent

Another misdemeanor I often come across is using tabs instead of a first line indent. Although tabs will create what looks like an indent, using a first line indent is a better strategy. This is because first line indents are an attribute that can be part of a paragraph style. Once an attribute is part of a paragraph style, all changes are global and easy to apply. This ease of change translates into creative freedom for the designer. Experimenting with different fonts and styles is a snap, which leads to better design. Figure 3 shows how first line indents can be set in a paragraph style. If you use the tabs method (shown in the bottom image), be aware that you must hold the Shift key to separate the First Line Indent marker from the Left Margin marker below. 

4. Extra Returns Instead of Space Before or Space After

Let’s get this straight right now. The Return key was not invented to add blank lines to your page. Yes, it does add blank lines on the page when pressed, but this is not what it’s for.  Blank lines for space will always be the height of the previous line. If you want more or less space, you’ll have to change the leading value of the blank line or use additional blank lines. Plus, if your text reflows at any time, you may end up with a blank line at the top or bottom of a column, which could be a problem. But the most important reason this is a no-no is because line spacing can easily be made part of a paragraph style, using the Space Before and Space After features (Figure 4). As I said earlier, the use of paragraph styles gives designers artistic freedom. With the click of a button, you can increase or decrease the space before or after a paragraph with precision throughout your entire document.

5. All Caps or Underline Instead of Italics or Bold for Emphasis

Another holdover from the typewriter days (when there was no other way to indicate emphasis) is using all caps or underlines instead of bold or italicized type. Today, all caps should be used only for headlines or an occasional subhead. The eye relies on the size difference of upper- and lowercase characters when reading text passages. All caps, except in small doses, forces the reader to do extra work. Even worse is type that uses a script font and all caps (Figure 5a). Underlines fall into a similar category as all caps—a necessary evil when using a typewriter, an unfortunate relic when using a computer. Because of the widespread use of underlining to indicate Internet hyperlinks, many people still use underlines for print documents. A better solution to the emphasis problem in InDesign is a character style that can apply either Bold or Italic. Both are simple to create and even simpler to use. As you can see in Figure 5b, I’ve specified only the italic style to be applied. By leaving blank other attributes such as the Font Family, Size, and Leading, this style can be used with many different fonts.

A change of color or type size can also be an effective way to apply emphasis to text. Read Ilene Strizver’s TypeTalk: Typographic Emphasis for a deeper dive into all the ways you can make a specific piece of text stand out.

6. Fake Small Caps Instead of Real Small Caps

The concept of Small Caps isn’t a holdover from typewriter days, rather it’s a neat convention borrowed from the toolbox of professional typesetting. But you can’t just blithely assume you can use this feature—properly, I mean—without knowing if the font you’re using supports it. In Figure 6a, I’ve set the sentence in Times Roman and clicked the Small Caps icon in InDesign’s Control panel (Figure 6b). Because this particular version of Times Roman has no true small caps glyphs, it’s easy to see the difference in stroke weight between the large caps and the small caps. 

But in Figure 6c, set in Minion Pro Regular, both large caps and small caps are equal in weight. That is, separate glyphs exist in the font specifically for use as small caps.  Take this fact into consideration when choosing a document font. If you know you’ll need small caps, make sure to choose a font with true small caps, like Minion Pro. If you don’t know if a font has small caps, consult the foundry website. Usually this information can be found in the character map of the typeface you’ve chosen. You can also check the Show menu in InDesign’s Glyphs panel to see if a font offers true small caps.

7. Baseline Shift to Move Type Vertically

Like the telephone lines that seem made for birds to perch on, the baseline is the invisible line that type characters sit on. Those characters that don’t sit on the baseline are located either above (superscript) or below (subscript). Baseline Shift is a type attribute that, like the name says, shifts the baseline of a character either up (positive values) or down (negative values). One easy way to adjust Baseline Shift is by clicking the Baseline Shift control in InDesign’s Control panel (Figure 7a). Baseline Shift is also an attribute that can be automated and built into Paragraph or Character styles.

If you’re using baseline shift to increase the vertical space between two lines of text, don’t. This isn’t what it’s for. If the lines are in separate paragraphs, use Space Before or Space After (see Tip #4) to control vertical line spacing. If the lines are in the same paragraph, or you’re trying to make two one-line paragraphs closer together, adjust the leading value of your text to control line spacing.  I rarely need to adjust a character’s baseline, nor should you. This is not to say never use baseline shift, but rather, use it wisely. Here’s an example where using baseline shift can be helpful: When typesetting an email address, fonts tend to place the ‘at’ symbol (@) a bit higher on the baseline than I prefer. Applying a negative baseline shift to the symbol brings it down slightly, aligning it closer to the baseline of the surrounding text. It looks a lot better, but if your document has a lot of email addresses, baseline shifting each @ symbol will soon get tiring. Fortunately, automating a change like this is easy. Create a character style that specifies the amount you want to shift this symbol in your document (Figure 7b). In your paragraph style’s dialog box, choose the GREP Style pane (Figure 7c). Insert the name of the character style you created in the Apply Style field. In the To Text field, type the @ symbol. From now on, every @ symbol in your document formatted with that paragraph style will be moved downward to your liking.

8. Manual Bullets or Numbers Instead of Auto Bullets and Numbers

Recently I was hired to update a large textbook for a major publisher. The book, a step-by-step college manual for Microsoft Office, was filled with numbered and bulleted lists. Often the updates I performed consisted of deleting from or adding to these lists. Normally this would be simple, but in the case of this project, each list was created manually. That means numbered lists started with numbers manually keyed into the text. The same went for bullets. Fortunately, a bullet is a bullet, so adding or subtracting lines wasn’t a big problem. Not so with the numbered lists. Each time a line was adding or deleted I was forced to renumber these lists by hand, a task that’s neither fun nor a good use of one’s time. While I admit that setting up complex multi-level numbered lists is a bit tricky, creating single-level numbered or bulleted lists is not. The first step is to create a new paragraph style. In the Paragraph Style Options dialog box, open the Bullets and Numbering pane (Figure 8a). Set the List Type to either Numbers or Bullets. Note that you can add a character style. Doing so gives you the ability to create a customized bullet or number, rather than accept the default style of your font. You set the position of the bullet or number in the lower section of the dialog box. In this example, I’ve set my numbers to hang. This means that the number will be placed at the left margin. Per the instructions in the Numbering Style area, InDesign will add a period (.) and a tab before my text. Once the text is placed, it will hang flush with the first letter of my text, not with the number. 

To get a better idea of how this works, see Figure 8b. In the Tabs area of my paragraph style you can see how I’ve separated the two little triangles (hold Shift as you drag to split them). The top triangle indicates the left margin setting; the lower triangle indicates where my text hangs. Figure 8c shows the effect of my paragraph style.

9. Fake Italics Using Skew

InDesign lets you skew text, but just because it looks “kind of” italic, doesn’t mean you should use it instead of a true italic style! That said… I did have to resort to this trick once in my professional life. Once. Mum’s the word, huh? I was setting the name of a book in a font that had no italic style (according to The Chicago Manual of Style, book titles should always be italicized), and was backed into a nasty corner. The result wasn’t pretty, but my copyeditor approved, so we went with it. The easiest solution to this problem is to avoid fonts that lack an italic style. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible. Take the font Trajan, for example. Figure 9 shows a book title in Roman and with fake italics using InDesign’s Skew feature. In this example I skewed the text 7 degrees. The results aren’t terrible (unless you’re Carol Twombly, the font’s designer), but I don’t recommend bastardizing fonts by skewing or stretching unless you have no other choice.

10. Vertical or Horizontal Stretching of Type

The last no-no in our list—the vertical or horizontal stretching of type—has much in common with #9 (skewing type). Recently I saw an InDesign layout where the designer stretched the headlines 150% horizontally. I don’t really know why anyone would even think to do this, because it looks so bad! The same goes for vertical stretching (or squishing). Take a look at the four examples in Figure 10.

If you find yourself in a situation where you need your type to be condensed, compressed, or extended, use a font that has such styles. Helvetica Neue LT Std from Adobe is one such font, with over 50 different weights. Need a serif font with variety? Adobe’s Kepler Std has 170 separate weights! And the list goes on. Once again, respect the type designer who spent months or even years designing your typeface, and don’t distort type like these examples. Are there exceptions to this rule? I can think of only two. If you use InDesign’s Glyph Scaling feature in your paragraph style (Paragraph Styles > Justification), then you’re distorting your type. Fortunately, the amount of glyph scaling is usually only a small percentage of its actual size. I sometimes allow for 2% negative and positive scaling when I’m setting body text fully justified, so the distortion is impossible to see without a strong loupe. The other instance where distorting fonts is considered okay is in logo design. Usually working in Adobe Illustrator, logo designers often make small adjustments to fonts to make their logo unique. Done well, this kind of manipulation is an accepted practice among designers.

In Conclusion

As I said before, old habits die hard. But it’s never too late to change your ways. Each new document or new project is a clean slate where you can commit yourself to doing things the right way. And now that you’ve read this article, you’re already ahead of the game. The next step is to pay attention to how you’re setting type and to be vigilant about ridding yourself of bad habits. If you learned to type on a typewriter, you’re partly forgiven for your transgressions. But now that you know better, it’s time to improve those skills. I’ll be watching!